


When Wet

by Aezlo



Category: Megamind (2010)
Genre: Alien Biology, Betrayal, Drowning, Gen, Medical Experimentation, Mental Link, Pre-Canon, typical teenage angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:48:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27986442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aezlo/pseuds/Aezlo
Summary: He’s sixteen.He’d had plans: plans to take over the city, plans to get rid of that Metro Brat, plans to build Minion a better robot suit, plans to maybe make himself a robot army, plans to—plans to—His plans had not included this.---Being the sole survivor of an alien species means you find out the darnedest things about yourself at the worst (best?) times.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 70





	When Wet

He’s sixteen.

He’d had plans: plans to take over the city, plans to get rid of that Metro Brat, plans to build Minion a better robot suit, plans to maybe make himself a robot army, plans to—plans to—

His plans had not included this.

If he’s going to be a villain, he needs to take some territory, right? Muscle in, change the rules, show people he means business? He has some territory held now, a little lump of protection paid to him on the regular, and he’s slowly earning the trust of the underbelly near the wharf. He thought he’d been making some progress. He still gets hauled into juvie regularly, but juvie is a _joke_ compared to the prison he’s lived in since he was a babe. Certainly not built to contain the _criminally gifted_.

But this wasn’t a bust, he’d learned from last time. This was the genuine article! Uncle Larry had been good to him in prison, and Uncle Larry had promised him that this wasn’t a set up.

He’s not expecting his Uncle Larry’s right hook, or the sharp twist of a butterfly knife under his ribs from one of Larry’s goons.

(He’s only sixteen).

Someone in the dark behind him makes a joke about ‘sleeping with the fishes’ and usually his hearing is _great_ , but all he can hear right now is the roaring in his ears. He’s livid and terrified, spitting and snarling like a feral cat until they punch him again and break his nose, and he’s bleeding all over his favorite AC/DC shirt, and—

Cement is quite cold in the middle of the night, poured over one’s feet. And the wind caresses his face like—well, like something fond in the brief moments before he’s tipped over the edge to fall into the lake. It feels like he must fall for ages, for stories and stories, but it’s really just a six-foot drop. (He measures it, later).

He hits the water hard and sharp, like a slap, and it’s mid-October so the lake’s cold and murky. He sinks like a stone, and not just due to the cement. He’s all skin and bone, no fatty padding to keep him afloat, and the air got knocked out of him when he hit the water, so there’s no air pocket within him to hold onto. He’d had grand plans of holding his breath, but now he has hardly anything left as the wavering dark sky draws farther away from him and he sinks deeper. There’s a panic button being slammed somewhere in his mind, but he’s desperately trying to hold his burning lungs stagnant, hold onto the barest amount of dignity-no-no-oxygen.

He lands with a hard _thunk_ on the lake floor and the small bubble of air that he’d valiantly held onto jolts out of him at the shock to his body when he connects. He must have broken some ribs by the feel of it, too.

He squirms and wiggles ferociously. He had _plans_ , and-and-Minion, he can’t just _leave_ Minion—he’ll figure something out, he always does! Sometimes they put cuffs that are too large on him and if he can jiggle his wrist _just_ right, he can get out of them, he just has to move his wrist _just_ right and—there’s a snap as something in his wrist gives and he sucks more water into his beaten lungs.

Well. Hm. Uncle Larry would’ve known to put tighter cuffs on him, _right_.

He kicks his cemented feet to no avail, and his vision begins to spot around the edges. The black spots coalesce, tunneling and collapsing his sight.

He can’t do this—he can’t—this isn’t _fair_ , he’s survived this long, he isn’t destined for _this_! Not drowning in the stupid lake!

He doesn’t mean to. He hasn’t reached for it since he was twelve, since he was quivering and tied to a steel table and felt too-hot hands pulling at his clothes, that day when they’d started poking around with their scalpels without preamble, preemptively blindfolding him and tying his hands and feet. They’d cut off samples of the webbing between his thumb and forefinger, prodded the weird cavities in his chest, dug around in his mouth and pulled out a few souvenirs.

“You think it needs these?” one of the young scientists had asked drolly, poking at something internal and weak and vulnerable that he’s palpated out into the dry lab air, prodding it with the dull edge of his scalpel. It’s so intensely sensitive and private that he’s hyperventilating already, his mantras and lullabies and Minion’s words in his native tongue getting rapidly tossed out the window, his teeth chattering as he begs, “no-don’t-please-no-don’t.”

“I suppose we’ll see—if it grows back,” his cohort chuckles, and then he’s visited by a gruesomely slow tug followed by a lava-like, searing hot pain and he _lunges_ for the bond, a thing which he had been desperately avoiding because Minion was safe, Minion was safe, Minion was safe with Warden and his Uncles and he needed him to be safe, he would sit here and be cut and hurt and Minion would be safe because humans saw Minion as an animal and they killed animals and-and-and—

His hands clap around the strange, vibrating cord on the edge of his mind. It’s dark, and he feels like it shouldn’t be. It should be lit up? Something’s wrong.

He shakes and struggles with the vibrating cord, desperate for some reaction, some proof of connection, _something_. The bond rewards him with a dead, resounding silence.

He’s alone. He’s alone. _He’s alone_.

That’s fine-that’s-that’s good—

He passes out from panic or pain or from screaming his head off and thrashing so hard that some of the straps become loosened and bloodied, it’s hard to keep track. And… when he wakes up, panting and scrabbling away from the human hands holding him—the Warden’s arms—he finds himself roughly jerked and jostled in the back of the Warden’s beaten up station wagon. _Minion_ , he’d gasped, gabbling at the bond and he knew where Minion was immediately, dropped to the floor of the car by his rough awakening. He lunges for him and claws his tiny body around the ball desperately. He cries disconsolately for days; the same eerie soundless sobbing the prisoners had corralled him into so they could keep him hidden.

It takes him a month to respond in English again. For a while they thought they’d permanently damaged his ears because all he responded to was Minion’s soft comforting clicks and the warmth of him in his head.

They didn’t really talk about it much. Before or after.

 _Minion_ , he thinks desperately, reaching out for a dark cord in blind hope that it’ll activate something that’s not there. He has memories of dancing in the water with Minion, something warm and sparky between them, Minion’s tendrils blinking in a lovely pattern and his own body luminescing back. He remembers his mother’s giddy laughter, high and clicky, as she watched them with dancing eyes underwater and it—that can’t be right. Maybe everyone’s right, he’s just got an overactive imagination. It doesn’t—no one can remember anything from when they were _eight days old_. Ridiculous.

He feels a faint tingle along the back of his neck. A sort of warmth, and then—

Nothing.

* * *

He’s dreaming of glittering minnows, black and green manta rays that span the sky. His head feels full of cotton and his chest burns. The air feels… strange. He’s not getting enough of it somehow, there’s nothing covering his face but it feels like he’s trying to breathe through a wet washcloth. His vision is… bad, everything’s sort of foggy and dark, and he blinks and blurs his eyes until something sort of… _clicks_ into place and he can see better now. He has good night vision, so it’s weird that he’s having such trouble with the dark here.

He's having trouble with a lot of things, he realizes belatedly. There’s a bed of seaweed swaying in the breeze—er… water, swaying in the _water_ in front of him. An old wreck of a jalopy is somewhere further down in the water, and he’s… he’s breathing. He’s breathing water? He coughs out sharply, but there’s no giant bubble of air, just a _shush_ of water billowing away from him.

He wracks his muzzy, deoxygenated brain for clues. Perhaps he’s dead? He remembers the knife in the back, the punches, the kick into the water. He can faintly see the dark night sky above him.

It’s cold this deep underwater. He’d never really thought about it but water gets colder the deeper you get, doesn’t it?

There’s not much he can do; his body is slowly going numb in the deep cold of the lake; his lungs burn and ache and with each deep inhale he’s not getting enough oxygen. His vision is still spotty around the edges, but it doesn’t seem like he’s going to pass out again. His feet are still encased in cement. His hands are still behind his back.

He’d never really learned how to swim, not that he’s really in any shape to try at the moment. There was no pool in the prison, and he’d only learned about baths once he’d started breaking out and setting up outside.

He’d been hoping to buy a little property, one of the old warehouses near the lakeside. He had enough socked away for it, and Uncle Larry had promised him a good deal with a friend of his.

He should’ve remembered that Uncle Larry’s promises are _utter horseshit_ whenever there’s money involved.

There’s some chemical spill somewhere in the water of the wharf, and the water pollution spreads a little differently than if it were something airborne. He can taste it in his lungs, strangely, more than his mouth. He doesn’t… he doesn’t have to open his mouth to breathe and he doesn’t know what that even _means_.

 _Maybe this is all some stupid dying dream nonsense and I’m just imagining all this_ , he laments.

This isn’t really a very classical heaven or hell, though? It just looks like… Lake Michigan at night. Near the wharf. Near _his_ wharf.

There’s some… dull noise somewhere nearby. Everything’s kind of eerily quiet underwater, and the light of the crescent moon is quite pretty as it ripples through the water.

He feels another warm tingle along his neck, like a human getting uncomfortably handsy with his occipital and he jerks forward with a sharp growl and hiss. He wrestles himself around to see _who_ or _what_ is fondling him, but he’s… pretty alone. The wooden beams footed by cement cylinders that hold up the wharf are a ways away; he’s drifted deeper into the lake away from the point that he’d been originally kicked off of. There’s not really fish out here, especially with that chemical spill nearby.

The beams of the wharf at least tell him which way _land_ is, and as much as he enjoys the idea of slowly freezing to death or starving or something … in a crazed fever dream cooked up by his dying mind… perhaps he should take the situation into his own hands.

He leans forward and manages to use the weight of his head to slowly bonk down, jarring his chin as it smashes into the silt of the lakebed. It’s undignified, but with his feet and hands the way they are, he doesn’t have much choice, so he just sort of… inch-worms his way up along the lake floor, up towards the lakeside.

It’s exhausting, but he’s been getting quite a workout lately, running from the cops, dealing with Metro Man (technically Metro _Boy_ for the next year and a half, but he’d claimed the adult title early), and hunting down other criminal heels like… well, like he was going to be hunting down Uncle Larry once he got out of this stupid predicament.

He breaches the water at last, and the cold air hits his back and chills him desperately before he can even get his head out of the water.

He shoulders his way up, intent on flopping on the beach and panting away until his body stops being so shocked at the change in temperature out of the water, but—

He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe! He makes horrendous gasping, wheezing noises, sucking and choking on _air_ now. He can’t breathe air? He’s literally drowning—on air??

He tries to flop himself back into the water, his vision spotting worse as he gasps and chokes wetly, and he distantly hears a motorcycle engine scream and come roaring closer as heat pools around his ears and the back of his throat. He manages to curl so that the waves are submerging and—and drowning-undrowning him with their lapping motion, but he’s still, he’s still not getting enough air, the sense of breathing through a wet washcloth even worse now.

“Sir! Sir, you’re alright!” he hears Minion’s squeaky hip joint and the rest of his heavy robot body storming across the cement and down the beach.

He’s still gasping for air indelicately, choking with his lungs hot and throbbing in protest.

“Sir?” he glances up at Minion, or tries to but, oh, he hadn’t realized his right eye had gotten swollen shut at some point. He catches a bit of Minion’s overwhelming size from behind the crook of his nose and smiles weakly.

{You came,} he beams with a broken, weeping lip, something clicking and chattering in his chest that aches from disuse and he coughs hard. Minion’s eyebrow ridge raises at that, but Megamind doesn’t really have the capacity to consider what language he just spoke in or how.

Minion reaches down and plucks him from the water, shaking him off a little, using his robot strength to clip off the cuffs. He seems to decide to deal with the cement boot later, adjusting his clothes a little before hefting him up to begin hauling him to the motorcycle over his shoulder.

Megamind begins gasping in greater earnest, now completely removed from the water with his lungs not functioning on air quite yet.

“Sir? Sir, what’s—did you puncture a lung? Sir?” Minion sets him down roughly and begins pulling off his wet shirt, trying to be careful even though it’s pretty obviously ruined.

Megamind’s vision is beginning to tunnel again, but he looks down at his chest along with Minion, feeling drunk and loopy from repeated asphyxiation.

The four little white slits on his chest that he’d used to think were scars left over from the lab are flared open and swollen with something. The tissue inside is deep purple and looks sort of… feathery, or finned. He has very visceral memories of what it feels like to have that tissue cut away and he instinctively, but weakly tries to hug his shivering body to hide the… the things. Minion scoops him up and lobs him back into the water, holding a robot hand down on his shoulder blades to get his chest fully under the water.

Megamind takes a sharp inhale as Minion inadvertently prods the stab wound, and for once in the past… however long it’s been, he gets a huge, deep lungful of air—er… water. He laughs faintly, feeling light headed, delirious, giddy.

Minion pulls his head out of the water carefully, still holding his chest down but tucking his head up by the chin. Minion’s leant over him, his fish body technically upside down in comparison to his robot body. “Sir, you need to vent your spiracles so you can switch back to your lungs,” Minion stares at him worriedly.

“W-what?” he tries to say, but there’s no oxygen to breathe on his larynx, so nothing comes out. He sputters and coughs, and Minion dunks his head back under water.

“ _Exhale_ ,” Minion states, clipped and quick as he pulls Megamind’s head out of the water again. “Ready, sir?” Minion asks, and Megamind nods weakly. He focuses on shunting out all the oxygen in his body even though, considering all the drowning he’s been doing lately, his body rather greedily wants to hold on to all of it. Minion pulls him out of the water and drags him to the shore.

“Use your lungs, _breathe_ , sir,” Minion shakes him gently as water weeps from the spiracles. He coughs and spasms, spitting up more water and struggling to reorient his body to breathing in air instead of water.

“H-hhhh,” he breathes vaguely, feeling dazed and dizzy. “Minion,” he manages and gives his henchfish a droopy smile, “you fas’t’ic fussh.”

Minion gives him a lop-sided, worried grin, “Back to the lair, sir?”

**Author's Note:**

> Can't guarantee this will be last I write for Megamind (but this is all I've been able to shake out of my notes since I got super obsessed with it August).
> 
> You can find me at [aezlo](http://aezlo.tumblr.com) on tumblr, or aezlo on most social media services. Comments and kudos are appreciated!


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